Meagan Cass encourages students to discover what moves them

Almost everyone who has tried their hand at fiction has heard the advice: Write what you know. By doing so, the thinking goes, the writer will be able to draw upon the familiar, and then the prose will begin to fly.

Almost everyone who has tried their hand at fiction has heard the advice: Write what you know. By doing so, the thinking goes, the writer will be able to draw upon the familiar, and then the prose will begin to fly.

Meagan Cass is an author and assistant professor of English at the University of Illinois Springfield. Many of her short stories contain autobiographical elements — in particular, her experiences playing sports while growing up in upstate New York. While Cass does mine her own past for material, she puts a caveat on the “write what you know” axiom.

“The trick is writing about what you don’t know about what you know. Because if you only write about what you know, there wouldn’t be any element of discovery,” Cass says.

In her creative writing and short fiction writing courses, she tells her students to focus on subjects that interest and inspire them on an individual level. Rather than simply writing a rote description of historical events, Cass encourages them to use what they know as a starting point from which invention and creativity can spring.

“A lot of my stories are set in the town where I grew up, but I had to name my hometown something different and find ways to give myself some imaginative ways to move, while drawing from experiences that are autobiographical. But it’s still fiction, obviously,” she says.

Pulling from life

Cass has had her stories published in respected literary journals such as Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Pinch, Grist, Aethlon and The South Carolina Review. Her work is somewhat rare in that it deals with a subject matter not common in literary circles, although she is using it to explore themes that extend beyond the lines of competition.

“A lot of my stories deal with gender and female athletes. Women and girls who are kind of butting up against and questioning traditional notions of femininity,” she says.

As a youth, Cass ran track and was a figure skater, but it was soccer at which she really excelled. She started playing at age 4, eventually going on to play on select teams and in high school, then on the club team at Binghamton University, where she earned bachelor’s degrees in English and philosophy.

“Those experiences have definitely informed my work,” she says.

In addition to her undergraduate work, Cass has a master’s degree in fine arts in fiction from Sarah Lawrence College and a doctorate in English from the University of Louisiana Lafayette. Busy in her first year at UIS, she has put participating in sports on hold for now, but wouldn’t mind eventually hooking up with a hockey team, a sport she picked up after college. For now, her focus is on helping her students understand the art of fiction and to become better writers.

Page 2 of 3 - “The most prevalent thing that I’ve noticed is that most students have more experience with visual media than they do with contemporary literary fiction. They have seen a lot of movies and played a lot of video games, but they haven’t read a lot of stories,” she says.

Rhythm and flow

Although film relies on the same storytelling elements found in fiction, popular motion pictures tend to focus on highly dramatic settings, with ramped-up action scenes and a preponderance of vampires and zombies. Cass says she challenges her students to move away from what’s common in popular culture and to address themes that they find compelling on an individual level. She also encourages them to read the work of accomplished authors.

“I think it’s important for students to join the contemporary literary conversation. They need to know what’s being published now and how their work fits into that context,” she says. “So I always have them reading a range of literary journals.”

It is important for aspiring writers to not only invent compelling stories, but to focus on language and how sentences sound.

“Writers don’t sit down and say, ‘I’m going to write the great American novel,’ because if you did that you’d be completely paralyzed,” she says. “The way I work is to build one sentence after the other. I read everything out loud while I’m writing so I stay very attuned to the rhythm of my sentences. That’s a big part of the pleasure of writing for me.”

In her own work, Cass has found that when the writing begins to sound forced or clunky, it’s often a sign that there is a flaw in the structure of the story. Once the flaw is corrected, the language starts flowing again.

She feels fortunate to be at UIS at this point in her career, both for the inspiration she gets from working with a dedicated group of scholars in the English department and the opportunity to explore different areas of study.

“One of the wonderful aspects of my teaching job is that I have a lot of freedom to design my own classes. My fiction-writing workshop in the fall, for example, is themed around writing the fantastic, with units on fairy tales, magical realism and literary takes on science fiction and the ghost story,” she says.

Passionate about words

Outside the classroom, Cass continues to be involved in literary projects. She has served in editorial positions for two literary journals, Rougarou and Harpur Palate, and is currently the fiction coordinator for the Best of the Net Anthology. (Rougarou is a University of Louisiana Lafayette publication; Harpur Palate is published by Binghamton University; Best of the Net Anthology is hosted by Sundress Publications, a female-friendly publication group.)

Page 3 of 3 - “This anthology was conceived as a way to highlight all of the amazing literature that’s being published online and give it more legitimacy and a more prominent forum,” she says.

As the fiction coordinator, she reads all of the submissions and recommends finalists for judging. As a writer, she’s also been on the receiving end of such an honor. Dan Chaon — an acclaimed author and National Book Award finalist — nominated one of Cass’s stories, “Egg Toss, August 1989,” for the 2012 Wigleaf Top 50 (very) Short Fictions. The list recognizes stories under 1,000 words.

“That is one of my favorite stories we’ve ever taken. The way Meagan paints details in that piece, blends poetic, rhythmic language with clear, concise images and gives a sense of nostalgia without ever getting sentimental, is truly an art,” says Tara Laskowski, senior editor at SmokeLong Quarterly, the journal that originally published the story.

Cass is currently compiling an anthology of her short stories, which she hopes to have completed in the next six months. About 85 percent of the stories were previously published in literary journals. Although she can see herself writing a novel at some point, she has no immediate plans to do so and enjoys working within the short story format.

“I like the tension in it. It’s such a tight form and you really have to concentrate the prose around the content. And I like the way that it kind of crosses genres with poetry,” she says. “It’s for readers who are looking for stories that will maybe push them outside of their comfort zone a little bit. Stories that they will want to read over and over again.”